| February 20, 2008 | Wednesday | Safar 12, 1429 |
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The intentions and benefits of election tourism
LAHORE: With visas issued to hundreds of election observers and journalists, it was hard for ordinary Pakistanis to vote without tripping over a foreigner. I know several of the visiting journalists and observers, and they are seasoned professionals who have covered elections in many countries. But this is not true for most of them who, cameras slung over their shoulders and notebooks in hand, were out there on Feb 18 in droves, earnestly observing the (smallish) queues of voters.
Welcome to the world of election tourism. After medical tourism, disaster tourism, gastronomic tourism and sex tourism, here is another kind of exciting adventure travel. One British MP and a senior civil servant had expressed their desire to visit Pakistan to monitor the election. I have no idea if they finally made it. But clearly, being an election monitor in a dangerous part of the world gives one a cachet of sorts. I can imagine the impact this sort of throwaway line would make at a party: “I’m sorry to have missed X’s birthday, but I had to dash off to Pakistan to monitor the election there.” Of course it helps if there’s some cash at the end of it, and somebody else is picking up the travel and hotel bills. According to a report by Robin Wright for the Washington Post (printed in this newspaper on Feb 18), the State Department has engaged a firm called Democracy International to send monitors to Pakistan at the last moment for a sum of one million dollars. Apparently, no experienced monitors were willing to travel to our country because of security concerns, so the State Department was forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with this consulting firm.
As the contract was signed on Feb 8, it is unlikely that the observers who finally made it to Islamabad had even recovered from their jetlag before being launched at constituencies across the country. Wright quotes Marl L. Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group:
“However decent the individual observers are, the concept of throwing an election observation mission together at the last minute flies in the face of all the lessons learned in 25 years of election monitoring.”
And if the Democracy International team was unsure of what time zone they were in when they landed, spare a thought for US Senators Hagel, Kerry and Biden Jr. These upstanding members of the American Congress flew in two days before the elections, and made a beeline for Lahore. What exactly they hoped to achieve there is unclear, but I’m sure this daring trip will look impressive to the voters back home.
What these last-minute election tourists fail to realise is that in Pakistan, rigging has been reduced to a science, with little or no need to resort to manipulating the results on election day. We leave crude practices like ballot-stuffing to inexperienced countries like Kenya. After all, Pakistan is the country that coined the term ‘pre-election rigging’. Foreigners are confused when we use this expression, and all the various techniques have to be spelled out to them. The other day, in an investigative report on the Dawn News Channel, a retired army officer who had headed an intelligence agency, corrected the reporter, and said he preferred ‘political engineering’ to ‘pre-election rigging’.
This political engineering consisted of cobbling together the IJI, and financing many of the anti-Bhutto alliance’s candidates with money siphoned off from Mehran Bank in 1988. Unsurprisingly, the bank folded soon thereafter. But who said political engineering came cheap?
We need to ask why there is so much interest in Pakistani polls. After all, elections in, say, Outer Mongolia would not attract the battalions of monitors, observers and journalists that the Feb 18 elections have pulled in. The presence of so many foreigners probably exceeds the total number of all the tourists we played host to for all of last year. Clearly, there is great concern about the outcome of the polls. The world sees them for the referendum on Musharraf that they have become.
In a sense, the West feels it has a stake in the outcome. If the elections had been seen to be blatantly rigged, the violence and instability they could trigger would impact on Europe’s and America’s security. Indeed, in an interview with a Canadian radio station on election day, I was asked what impact the results would have on the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal belt.
The answer is that as I write this article, the projected outcome will certainly change the way this war has been waged thus far. With an ANP-led government in the NWFP, the Islamic holy warriors won’t get the same kid-glove approach they had become used to when the clerics of the MMA were running the provincial government. And without the presence of politicians like Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and Ijaz ul Haq in the federal government, Islamabad is likely to take a tougher stand against extremism. With a PPP-led coalition in power, we are unlikely to see another Lal Masjid episode.
So in this sense, the interest the rest of the world is taking in the Pakistani elections is perfectly understandable. In Britain, there has been justifiable concern about the fact that most of the suspects held for planned terrorist acts seem to have some connection with Pakistan. Often, they have visited an extremist madressah or a training camp in our country. A secular, liberal government will, I hope, end Musharraf’s foot-dragging and tackle this menace.
Finally, an admission: while talking about journalists visiting Pakistan to cover the elections, I failed to disclose that I have timed my visit here to observe them as well.
In my defence, I can only say that I have been witness to every election here since 1970, and am well versed in the various techniques used to massage results. So I am delighted to inform readers that in the Lahore constituencies I went around in, at least, there were no signs of a master-plan to steal the elections. Indeed, the results speak for themselves. Perhaps the presence of so many foreign observers did do some good after all…
